


free fall

by fatiguedfern



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Songfic, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-06 01:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12201369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatiguedfern/pseuds/fatiguedfern
Summary: Don't we all fall?





	free fall

_come out while the rain is gone_

 

When it rains, it pours. 

The husk curls in on itself. A splattered halo forms around its head and paints the carpet a brilliant crimson with leaked life. 

And so the first corpse is found, and somewhere, buried beneath coatings of panicked haze, Saihara knows it isn't the last. 

And it isn't. 

Preserved in brine spilt from tear-prickled eyes, limp bodies pile up one after the other. The halls are left to flood with unmoving flesh and guilt-ridden minds.

Saihara drowns in the seemingly unending downpour.

And when the downpour finally clears, and they re-emerge from rubble wetted with blood, Saihara feels as if he can almost breathe again.

 

_slow down breathing on your road_

 

Kaede paves her path with doubt and mistrust.

A little white lie blossoms. Its petals unfurl until the seed of suspicion scatters and corrupts.

She addresses the class again, and this time she can feel the deceit grate between her teeth in coarse grains. The air she breathes catches in her throat suddenly as if the breeze had swept through waves of tar. 

She coughs down the bile laced with dread in a polite hack into her palm. Her voice wavers and her breath rasps, but if there’s anything she’s used to, it’s steadying notes. 

Her platitudes ring clear.

 

_and the world keeps spinning around_

 

Grave faces are distorted into smudged pastel portraits as he’s spun. His eyes cross with the swirl of blurred scenery that birls around him. 

The rope used to string him up creaks while wrung out. The sound’s blotted out by blood rushing in his ears. 

His swivelling world jolts to an abrupt halt, paws gripping at his sides. 

Meanwhile, the world beyond keeps spinning all the same.

 

_while we dive in it_

 

His head aches. A dull throb splits down his scalp. 

The water laps at his lungs, insistent. He strains against the familiarly cuffed metal. It isn’t the first time that cuffs adorn his wrists, but it is the first that he struggles against his bound fate. 

His head’s forcefully pushed down. Metal scrapes against porcelain. 

He could live. 

His desperation peaks and his struggling grows frenzied. Gasps of breath are stolen between the brief victories where he surfaces. 

He’s forced down again. 

Hoshi feels his strength dwindle, lack of oxygen getting the better of him. He gives one last tug, but the hands pressing him into the water stay firm. 

He could live… but he supposes he doesn't really deserve to.

He lets the waves overtake him. And when the time comes, he dives through the veil.

 

_and the world keeps bringing us down_

 

His fist collides with the wall. Curses are spat as the skin coating his knuckles cracks and peels.

Another trial. Another blackened dead. Another failure.

He covers his bleeding fist with a sweaty palm. The salt stings the raw wound. 

In the morning, he’d keep his chin held high. Even if the trial had weighed Momota Kaito of the stars down to hell’s surface.

 

_leaving marks on our skin_

 

Semi-crescents bite into his skin.

Ouma cranes his neck to the side to get a better view of the string of bruises. Pale purples and greens wrap around his throat in the ghost of a handprint. 

He presses a finger to the mark where Harukawa’s nails had bit hardest. He doesn't bother to flinch as the pain’s sting burns just a bit more.

He frowns, wondering if he'd be able to find foundation to cover up the marks in pale powder.

 

_cold wind beneath our wings_

 

With morning light and burning suns she soars. God’s ubiquitous hands stretch from above, plucking at translucent twine threaded through unseen eyelets. 

Sunlit spider silk knits into widespread wings. Wings cut into polluted wisps of air iced with faithless frost. But God’s touch is warm and the heat seeps through her bones. 

During the daylight her words are God’s and during the daylight, God reaches down and places her atop their shoulders, perching high enough to see their creation unfurl beyond mapped land. 

And at night, when uncertainty grips at her heart and corrodes her mind and God's hands loosen ever so slightly, she doesn't dream. For when the sun rises, a world of dreams is re-lit and God’s guiding light shines.

 

_breezing out till we let it in_

 

There's a little tune that hums in her ear. Soft and enticing, it invites her fears to surface above crass words and sweating limbs.

The tune taps on the paper walls of her feeble restraint. Ouma’s back remains turned to her. The tune questions how a knife might look protruding from it. 

Iruma finds herself worrying over the same thought until its nuance fades and it comes leaps closer to becoming reality.

 

_don’t we all fall_

 

From the cupped palms of God she watches as the circumstantial hunters and their prey dwindle and fade. 

She's safe within God's armoured grasp, but it seems the doubt pooling in her mind isn’t sifted through their fingers. Doubt speaks of the dead returning from their graves. Doubt speaks of inanimate flesh being raised. Doubt’s blasphemous tongue speaks of playing god. 

And Doubt reminds her of fear, and Doubt offers to quench it. And Doubt’s words are heard.

God frowns down upon her as she crafts faces in the same image as they had, but it's no matter for she still stands in the safety of their grasp. She doesn't feel her own slipping.

 

_chasing lights of the dying limbs_

 

Saihara recalls warmth seeping through his skin and heating the churning blood below; a hand curled over his shoulder. He remembers strength in the grip.

Momota sputters out a mouthful of cooling blood onto the floor. They crowd around him. He pushes them away. 

He gives a dull smile, curdled crimson lacing between his teeth. Saihara's blinded by a dim flicker of hope.

The softly tugging image of a dying face at the corner folds of his mind remains. 

 

_change will come if we don't begin_

 

Shirogane idly drums her fingers against the glass of the screen, watching as Ouma's face ripples beneath her fingers.

Panels light the wall. The remainder of her fellow contestants dot the surfaces of the spilt glass pane. 

Shirogane watches their caged world with keen eyes, whistling the theme from the 51st season through her teeth.

She loops around set formulas, eyes never leaving the screen. 

 

_don't we all fall_

 

Defeat tastes of iron and rust. It sifts through his teeth and splatters onto his podium as his legs crumple and give out. 

He hears worry in their voices as they loom over him. But he's fine. He’s _fine_. He’s _alive_. Though unsure of how long he would remain so, he’s alive.

 

_stone cold by the silver sea_

 

Trained hands cock the stirrup until the arrow pulls taut. There's a sense of uneasy pit knotting in her throat, she's long since learnt the art of snuffing out her feeble conscience. 

Maki’s fingers pause at the latch, worrying against well-tempered metal. She wonders what shade Ouma’s soul would be coloured as it slowly - painfully - leaks out. She’d like to think it’d be a murky grey, to match that of the rest of the sinners dispatched by her hand. If not a pitch black.

 

The door to the machinery bay crackles open. Muted silver starlight flickers between the clamped press.

 

_ripped off all this make believe_

 

Reality settles itself into the form of two bodies; their napes sliced agape. 

Shinguji's face turns an off purple as he’s boiled alive. He deserves it, really. He deserves to rot. 

There's nothing otherworldly about his death, she thinks. His blood simmers and his spirit is ripped from his body, but when the specter melts with the spray of purified crystal grains, Yumeno doesn't think of anything but a snail de-shelled and writhing and seething beneath crusted granules of salt.

The curtain draws closed on the execution and Yumeno doesn't feel a single spark of magic fizzle at her fingertips. 

 

_and we all travel until the lights kick in_

 

Amami boards the bullet train without a camera flashing. He’s relieved.

 _Team DanganRonpa_ ’s an hours trip away. He shifts until the metal bench he's sat accommodates his hunched form. It’s a long ride, but he's certain that the car would empty out before his destination is reached. He pulls his hood just a bit further over his eyes.

He flicks through printed news of a world he hadn’t formally re-entered since the end of the 52nd season. A watch strapped to the wrist hung from one of the handles above him ticks obnoxiously. The train keeps rattling over the tracks at a swift pace.

The passenger beside him tries their best to avoid pressing flush against him and as soon as the bench leaves enough space to, they slide away.

As expected, the train car is mostly empty, the crowd of people dressed in neatly pressed shirts dwindling as his destination draws nearer. His neighboring passenger remains. He spares a quick glance in their direction.

The girl's dressed in a standard school uniform, skirt folding neatly over her knees. She was probably around his own age.

The train grinds to a halt. The girl stands before Amami can get to his own feet. 

“Wait! You wouldn't happened to be-”

“Auditioning? Yes, and I’m late as is, so if it's quite alright with you, I’ll be going.”

Amami rubs at his neck, pulling off his hood in the process. The girl's eyes widen before narrowing back into slits. “Well, I guess we’re heading to the same destination after all.”

She continues to clamber out the exit. Amami frowns. “Good luck, I guess.” 

She cranes her neck in his direction. “I won't need it.”

Amami steps out, noting the girl as a potential threat all the same. Pity any remembrance of spilling blonde hair and amethyst eyes is lost with the flare of a floodlight. 

 

_while we all keep climbing the walls_

 

Kiibo rockets into the sky, climbing higher into the cage and overshooting the buildings of Saishuu Academy. 

A ray of condensed light cuts through stone and metal as easily as a knife passing through warmed butter. Kiibo thinks it's all a more than necessary sacrifice. 

The ringleader’s crushed somewhere below and they're certain that it's a necessary sacrifice too. As are they. 

The caged walls implode along with a spatter of scorched cogs.

 

_chasing the marks on our skin_

 

Thorns pierce the synthetic second layer of skin of her gloved hands. She climbs higher, ignoring the cutting sting burning at her palms. 

A low growl sounds. The twirling blades slice across her back and her grip painfully tightens. She keeps moving.

The blades swipe across again, and again, and again. But Toujou’s never been one to throw in the towel so easily. She climbs higher, eyes fixating on the the beaming sunlight above.

 

_wailing winds come sailing in,  
softly as a gusty sea_

 

Tenko screams. 

The world speaks softly, almost inaudibly, and its unseen and unspoken atrocities are lost. The inhabitants growl and snarl.

Tenko screams. 

Men growl the most. They snap and yelp and leave black and blue bite marks. 

Tenko screams. 

His voice is guttural and rasped against her ear. 

Tenko screams.

His hands grip at her shoulders, thumbs pushing down into hollow dips. His breath smells of scotch and detergent. The snarled wind batters her face.

Tenko pushes.

 

_fading out,  
recovering_

 

Maki watches as Yumeno's head gently rises with Saihara's uneven breathing from its position lolled onto his chest. Saihara's hand clasps around the remote tightly and Yumeno's hair spreads out in a fan of ruby.

She turns her attention back to the source of the cartoonish voices echoing throughout the apartment. 

She briefly considers prying the remote from Saihara's hand, but decides against it. Sleep was hard enough to come by as is. 

She slumps onto the floor and against the lower part of the couch. Cartoonish voices trill throughout their space until her eyelids flutter shut.

 

_giving warmth a blazing light_

 

The flames stretch high enough that one might think they'd brush against the sky itself. 

Gonta burns half-alive within the red and orange haze. Confusion still muddled thickly his mind. 

A guiltless mind fuels the rapidly consuming flames.

 

_the arctic sun shines in the night_

 

While the sun shines, Ouma paints himself a villain. And while the sun shines, people see him as such.

When night falls, Ouma hides beneath blanketed darkness. And when night falls, he can frown and silently struggle against the game. And when night falls, he can mistake himself for having good intentions. 

When night falls, he can worry over strategies until night bleeds into morning and his intentions are labelled villainous once more.

 

_falling stars out of the sky_

 

Kaito pierces through the heavens. He seems to float in the widespread ocean of stars before gravity weighs down.

He plummets, choking and sputtering on his own lifeblood. 

Dented metal collapses into the earth and the capsule’s door flies open. A fallen star lies extinguished.

 

_don't we all fall_

 

The woven vine creaks and splits with the slice of a blade.

Shinguji falls into the seething seas below.

 

_don't we all fall_

 

She reaches for the warmth spread from the sun. Her hand brushes against crinkled paper. 

The vine snaps. 

She falls.

 

_don't we all fall_

 

Shuuichi pauses, scrolling up through the application form again. 

His heart pounds in a blur of euphoria. He clicks _send_. The cursor falls to the bottom of the screen. 

 

_don't we all_

 

**fall**

**Author's Note:**

> I did trim the original song quite a bit to avoid getting too repetitive, so... Lyrics from [Fall by Dotan](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E3WQl3S5pPg) thanks to ao3 user ikuzonos for betaing!


End file.
